Dead Poet Brightens Met’s ‘Don Giovanni’: Manuela Hoelterhoff

A scene from the Met's new production of the Mozart opera "Don Giovanni," directed by Michael Grandage; Christopher Oram designed the sets and costumes. Photographer: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera via Bloomberg

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- An Italian Jewish priest who
ended up selling vegetables and teaching at Columbia
University before he died in New York in 1838 is the real
star of the new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at
the Metropolitan Opera.

That would be Lorenzo Da Ponte, whose libretto about a
doomed Spanish stud is still funny almost 225 years after
he knocked it out for the cheering people of Prague.

The Met audience was similarly amused, though I
suspect most of us aren’t particularly fluent in Italian.

Yet thanks to those surtitles (nicely translated by
Cori Ellison) that gleam on seat backs, the laughs kept
coming even so.

If only the stage action were as witty.

Michael Grandage, a noted British theater director, is
making his Met debut with this show -- Mozart’s greatest
opera and a rather big bone for an opera neophyte to chew
on.

As you’ve noticed, the hiring of theater directors for
operas they invariably find befuddling is very chic at
especially the Met and London’s ENO.

I liked Grandage’s strangely comic “King Lear,” and
many of his productions at the Donmar Warehouse in London.
It is kind of embarrassing to see someone of his stature
struggle so.

Maybe he could have warmed up to the operatic
challenge with something more modest, say Mozart’s youthful
“La Finta Semplice,” about a moron, or maybe a minuet?

Mozart called his masterpiece a “dramma giocoso” --
a comic tragedy.

That strange tension makes the piece so intriguing and
also hard to stage.

My Girls

The clever story melds Da Ponte’s affection for maids,
his friendship with Casanova and the Spanish Don Juan
legend.

After making his escape from the bedroom of Donna Anna
and murdering her annoying father, Don Giovanni flits
through town, bumps into another old girlfriend, Donna
Elvira, tries to bed a peasant girl, parties like a madman,
invites a statue to dinner, refuses to repent and finally
goes to hell.

At the climax, a few feeble flames from gas jets
provide all the excitement of a backyard barbecue gone
terribly wrong.

The streetscape by designer Christopher Oram, another
Met newcomer, restricts the singers to a shallow area by
the orchestra pit, but it thankfully splits open now and
again for a scene change.

There is a hypnotic glimpse of balconies filled with
the girls the Don abandoned all over Europe (1,003 in Spain
alone, according to his weary manservant, Leporello).

Paule Constable lit the scene beautifully, though the
brown tonalities are wearying after an hour or so. Don’t
they use a lot of whitewash in Seville?

The singing was variable, astonishingly so for the
Met. Peter Mattei was the long-limbed, silky-voiced
seducer, stepping in for Mariusz Kwiecien, who injured his
back during the dress rehearsal.

In an unexpected way, Mattei’s confident appearance
revealed the strength of the production: It is so generic,
anyone who knows the score, and he does, will fit right in.

Mattei’s scenes with the amiable Luca Pisaroni had the
goofy, hey dude spirit that typically flourishes between
Giovanni and Leporello.

Never mind Ramon Vargas’s stylish delivery, Don
Ottavio was, as usual, excruciatingly dull. Mozart and Da
Ponte made him so, poking fun at a dutiful fool, the anti-Don Giovanni, who keeps it zipped, forever waiting for
Donna Anna, who yearns for the tall sexy baritone and not
the small tenor.

New Diva

She is a star: Marina Rebeka, a handsome Latvian
soprano making her Met debut. Her voice is bright and
flexible and for all I know she can act -- we will have to
await another appearance. She certainly nailed Anna’s
arias.

The two peasants were really adrift: Mojka Erdmann as
Zerlina and Joshua Bloom as her boyfriend Masetto.

Barbara Frittoli hung around as Donna Elvira, singing
without much passion. Her furious entrance -- “I will cut
out his heart!” was tediously staged by Grandage as a
walk-on with maid.

Get that woman a donkey cart! Or how about bringing on
the wolfhounds who enlivened a boring scene in the Met’s
opening night “Anna Bolena”?

Frittoli wasn’t helped either by Fabio Luisi’s lax
conducting. The first act seemed awfully long. Things got
better musically all around as we hurried through Act II
and the end when Da Ponte sent us out laughing.

After murder, mayhem, suicide and athletic sex, the
six remaining singers tut-tut briefly about the awful Don
Giovanni, and then merrily address the future. We’re off to
dinner! says Masetto, holding Zerlina. I am going to a
convent! opines Elvira. I need to heal my heart a while
longer, sings Donna Anna to the crushed Don Ottavio.